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Improving safety culture through sub-committees

Thursday, 29 November 2018

Debasis Guha is Departmental Head of Corporate Safety at UltraTech Cement Ltd. in India and holder of the NEBOSH International Diploma in Occupational Health & Safety. In this guest column he shares his experiences of using sub-committees to improve health and safety performance.

Safety culture is often described as the shared beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of an organisation about H&S. There are many ways to categorise culture and, even when we do, it is a mistake to think that culture is the same across an organisation (all teams, sites, countries). Culture can be influenced and developed.

Based on my experience of working in such organisations, I will share my learning of shifting the OHS culture from “independent” to “interdependent” (as described in “Bradley Curve”) wherein teams (not individuals):

help others

act as others’ keeper

play the role of networking contributor

care for others

feel organisational pride

Here at UltraTech Cement Ltd. we have a number of committees and boards that make up the OHS organisational structure:

Corporate Occupational Health and Safety BoardChaired by the Business Head, this Board meets every two months to review OHS performance of the organization as a whole and decide actions for further improvement.

Unit Apex OHS CommitteeLed by the Unit (Site) Head, these committee’s meet on a monthly basis to review each the safety performance of each of our 30 sites.

Corporate and Unit Sub-Committees We have established seven sub-committees that operate at both corporate and unit level (detailed below).

Sub-Committees

The creation of sub-committees has helped to drive consistency/uniformity across the business and strengthen major elements of our OHS management system.

There are 7 main sub-committees, listed below (further details of their responsibilities are available at the end of this document):

Standards, Rules and Procedures

Training and Capability Building

Contractor Safety Management

Safety Observation and Audit

Incident Investigation

Transport Safety

Occupational Health

To ensure active involvement and instill a sense of ownership, these sub-committees comprise of people from various line functions. Good practice from these sub-committees is shared across the business.

Benefits

Since the introduction of these sub-committees, we’ve reaped many benefits. There’s increased buy-in from sub-committee members and understanding that safety is the responsibility of the line function. By positioning senior managers as chair of these groups we have seen less conflict of priorities between production and safety and allocation of health and safety resources is no longer an issue. Last but not least, we’ve improved ownership and accountability by teams; all major elements of health and safety are being managed in a more effective manner which has led to improved performance of both leading and lagging indicators.

For example, safety training man-hours (one of the leading indicators) has doubled and lost time incident frequency rate (one of the lagging indicators) has reduced to one-third.

Ensure training and competency of employees on Safety Observation Process and of FPSA auditors by coordinating with T&C sub-committee.

Review and monitor compliance of observations/ findings raised through the processes of S.O., FPSA periodically.

Review and monitor performance of Safety Observation process, Quality of Safety Observation Process implementation at units through the identified KPIs and present the data to the OH&S Board through Business Safety Head.

Incident Investigation

To ensure reporting of all the incidents including near misses.

Develop and implement an incident investigation procedure consistently across all sites and

facilitate training of line managers in quality incident investigation.

Communicate significant incidents, along with recommendations for correction/prevention across the organisation.

Identify and analyse incident trends and brief site apex committee and monitor/track to ensure timely closure of recommended actions.

Transport Safety

Ensure all the vehicles engaged for business are with mandatory gadgets like reverse horn, rear view mirror, seat belts etc.